The present invention relates to a radar receiving device and radars including such devices.
Generally on reception and after transposing into intermediate frequency of the received signal, the usual technique used in radar processing is to produce a filter matched to the transmitted waveform. A matched filter maximizes the signal/thermal noise ratio as its transfer function is identical to the conjugate of the complex Fourier transform of the transmitted waveform. The various realizations of matched filters more or less approach the ideal filter and in order to do this they are more or less complex depending on the type of radar.
In the case of non-coherent radars (i.e. radars in which the phase relationships between successive echos in the same train of pulses are not used), a band filter is used matched to the pulse duration of the transmitted signal and centered on the intermediate frequency of the receiver.
In the case of coherent radars, a set of range gates of duration equal to the pulse duration and covering the whole of the range field is used. Each gate is followed by a bank of frequency filters in the specific case of Doppler radars. Processing then consists in comparing the amplitudes of the output signals from the matched filter, possibly after integration of amplitudes corresponding to several filtering cycles, with a threshold in order to decide if there is an alarm, i.e. the assumption of the existence of a target in the quantum considered (range, velocity, range velocity depending on the type of radar), the number of false alarms having to remain very low.
Most modern radars, particularly airborne radars, are ambiguous either in range or in velocity, or in both range and velocity, which is the case in medium repetition frequency (MRF) radars. Ambiguity is removed from the ambiguous parameters by periodic sequential modifications of the transmitted waveform, which is usually obtained by continuous or discontinuous variations in the recurrence frequency or in the transmitted carrier frequency. The period of these sequences must be sufficiently short for there to remain at least one of them during the illumination time of a target. Certain types of undesirable echos or signals, the characteristics of which are very different from useful echos (ground diffused echos, targets at unreasonable range or velocity), are eliminated by specific devices.
In principle the architecture, essentially based on the production of a traditional matched filter, even though optimized for detecting a target in a wide band white noise environment, has disadvantages when the hostile environment is no longer white noise. In fact the filtering loses information implicitly contained in the received signal and the means subsequently used in processing the filtered signal cannot in any way retrieve this information.